Conjoined Fugues is the second part of a happening which imagines Nietzsche’s breakdown and creates a narrative where Nietzsche (the audience) visits his mental breakdown once again under an indeterminate derealised state, a state of mind where reality ruptures. Through Nietzsche’s imagined breakdown, the four body-sculptures emerge and take agency in his mind and body. The performance begins with a dream-trip of a derealised state while the audience witnesses the state where objects are not identified in a simultaneous co-existence with an other world; on the one hand, the past entertains the moment before “self-abandonment” and “loss of memory”, and on the other hand, the audience witnesses the present where the performance seduces the suffering within the characters themselves.
Through Nietzsche’s correspondences to Cosima Wagner which were signed in the name of “Dionysos” the surreal in Nietzsche’s life, takes form. Nietzsche’s correspondences and breakdown become essential, and take one back to Nietzsche’s early philosophical thought related to the Greek mythological gods, Apollo and Dionysos. The Happening encourages the audience to lose their sense of self, and seize the blurriness between perception and representation, reality and fiction, subject and object, anatomy and topography.
The aesthetics of the Happening, are an impulse from a particular moment in history, the Happenings of the 1960s. Through Happenings, the performance considers “indeterminacy” that allows one to formulate and perceive the multiplicity of the environment, where two (or more) simultaneous environments emerge in space.
Conceptualisation and Direction: Nicolina Stylianou
Production Manager: Danai Anagnostou
Performance: Louna-Tuuli Luukka, Nicolina Stylianou, Jouni Ilari-Tapio, Suvi Tuominen
Sound Design: Jouni Ilari-Tapio
Visual Design: Ilmari Paananen
Set Developer: Marja Zilcher
Software Development: Joaquín Aldunate
Costumes Styling: the stranger·
Videography: Aman Askarizad
Photography: Amelia Chere
The work was kindly supported by Kone Foundation, Taiteen edistämiskeskus (TAIKE), and Vapaan Taiteen Tila.